The Blog
Notes on performance, evidence-first
Research write-ups, myth-checks, and what's actually happening in strength & conditioning — in Singapore and internationally. Every claim traces to a named, checkable source.
Research · Sprint Mechanics
“Drive Your Knees,” “Claw the Ground”: What Sprint Biomechanics Research Actually Says
Sprint coaching runs on a small set of inherited cues — drive your knees, claw the ground, pump your arms. Force-plate and motion-capture research has tested most of them directly, and the results split sharply: some describe real mechanics, one has essentially no supporting evidence, and how a cue is phrased may matter as much as what it says.
Research · Testing & Assessment
Force Plate Testing Explained: What the Data Actually Predicts (and What It Doesn't)
Jump height, reactive strength index, eccentric/concentric ratios, asymmetry index — a force plate printout looks like hard science. Some of it is. Some of the most commonly quoted numbers on that printout have surprisingly little evidence behind the way they're actually used.
Personal · Combat Sports Conditioning
What Actually Conditions a Fighter, and What's Just Tradition
Roadwork and shadowboxing rounds built the culture of combat sports long before anyone measured what a round actually demands. As a Muay Kru and Krav Maga instructor, here's my honest read on what the evidence says actually transfers to fight performance — and what's just tradition wearing gym shorts.
Personal · School Sports Systems
Two School Systems, One Island: What Coaching Inside Both Taught Me About Developing Young Athletes
I've stood on both sides of Singapore's school sports divide — as a Head of Department at an international school, and now inside MOE schools through Catch Them Young. The gap between the two systems is real, structural, and starts long before anyone picks up a ball.
Research · Youth Football Development
Small-Sided Games, Load Monitoring, and the FIFA 11+: What's Actually Changed in Youth Football Development
Physical literacy before technique, small-sided games as the default teaching method, a warm-up with its own randomised trials behind it, and GPS load monitoring written into an actual Singapore academy partnership — what FIFA and Singapore's FAS have actually built into youth football development, verified programme by programme.
Research · NS & IPPT Preparation
The IPPT Isn't the Test You Think It Is — What the Research Says About Actually Preparing for It
Standing broad jump. Chin-ups. Most guys picture a five-station test that was retired in 2015. Here's what the IPPT actually measures now, and what the training research — not the WhatsApp-group folklore — says actually improves push-up, sit-up, and 2.4km run performance without breaking you along the way.
Personal · Parents & Youth Sport
The Well-Meaning Mistakes That Push Young Athletes Toward Burnout
Five well-intentioned patterns come up in almost every conversation I have with sports parents — over-scheduling, early specialization, sideline coaching, ignoring pain, and comparing siblings. None of them come from not caring. Here's what the AAP, NATA, and sport psychology research actually says about each one.
Research · Female Athlete Physiology
Female Athletes, ACL Risk, and the Menstrual Cycle: What the Research Actually Shows
Female athletes face two to eight times the ACL injury risk of male athletes in the same sport — a disparity researchers have traced to specific, trainable landing mechanics. Training built around the menstrual cycle is one of the most confidently marketed ideas in women's sport science, and one of the least supported once the systematic reviews are actually read. What the evidence for each one really shows.
Research · Testing & Assessment
VO2max Testing in Team Sports: What the Field Tests Actually Predict
Beep test levels, Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Test distances, and lab-measured VO2max get treated as interchangeable numbers on a team-sport testing day. The exercise physiology literature says they aren't — and that VO2max itself explains less of what separates good players from great ones than the attention it gets would suggest.
Research · Longevity
Why a Handshake Might Predict Your Lifespan Better Than Your Blood Pressure
A five-second squeeze test has quietly become one of the most heavily studied predictors in medicine — tracked across more than three million people and shown to forecast death, heart disease, and cognitive decline more reliably than several standard clinical measures. Here's what a dynamometer reading actually reflects, and what the evidence says about training it.
Personal · Home Training Setup
What Actually Belongs in a Young Athlete's Home Gym — And What Doesn't
Parents ask me constantly what to actually buy for a young athlete's home training corner. My honest answer, built from years of coaching inside Singapore's HDB flats and condos: most of what gets bought does very little, a short list of cheap things does almost all of the real work, and the part nobody asks about — what happens once nobody qualified is watching — matters more than any single piece of equipment.
Research · Season Programming
Build It in the Off-Season, Keep It In-Season: What the Research Actually Shows
Cut the weight room the moment fixtures start, or keep pushing off-season volume once they do — most team-sport programs default to one of these two guesses. A landmark trial in professional soccer, since replicated in a high school gym, points to a specific, much smaller answer for the season, and a specific job for the off-season instead.
Research · Talent Identification
Your Kid's 'Talent' at Age 11 Might Just Be a Birthday — What the Research Actually Says
The kid who gets picked for the elite squad at ten is very often just the kid born earliest in the selection year — and the same body of research shows most successful junior athletes never become successful senior ones at all.
Research · Sleep
How Much Sleep Does a Teenage Athlete Actually Need? The Research Has an Exact Answer
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine's own consensus statement puts a specific number on how much sleep a teenage athlete needs — and most aren't close to it. What chronic sleep loss actually does to a still-developing brain's reaction time and injury risk, and why school bells and training schedules are working against the biology rather than with it.
Research · Injury Prevention
The Weakest Link: What the Evidence Says About Growth Plate Injury Risk in Young Athletes
A growth plate isn't a euphemism for general caution — it's a specific structure, reported to be up to five times more brittle than the ligaments around it, and it grows measurably more fragile during a growth spurt. Here's what the evidence says about why, which conditions actually follow, and how load can be managed around it.
Research · Sport Science
What "Physical Literacy" Actually Means — And Why It Comes Before Sport-Specific Training
"Physical literacy" gets used as a loose compliment for a coordinated kid. In sport science it's a defined, four-part construct — motivation, confidence, physical competence, and knowledge and understanding — with its own consensus definition, its own measurement instruments, and a specific, evidence-based place ahead of sport-specific skill training, not alongside it.
Research · Mobility & Flexibility
Mobility vs. Flexibility: What the Research Actually Says About Performance and Injury Risk
Coaches, physios, and social media use "mobility" and "flexibility" as if they're the same thing. The research treats them as different measurements — and when tracked against real injuries and real performance, only one of them keeps predicting anything. Here's what the evidence says predicts outcomes, and whether static stretching before sport actually helps.
Research · Injury Epidemiology
One Sport, All Year: What the Epidemiology Says About Overuse Injury in Youth Athletes
Real epidemiological data ties single-sport specialization to specific, measurable injury risks — stress fractures, knee tendinopathy, a 343% rise in youth elbow surgery. The tool sports science built to fine-tune training load around that risk, the acute:chronic workload ratio, turns out to be the subject of a genuine methodological fight inside the field that produced it.
Research · Speed & Agility
Do Agility Ladders Actually Make You More Agile? What the Research Says
Ladder drills are a fixture of youth and team-sport training worldwide, but the research on "agility" draws a sharp line between memorised footwork patterns and the reactive, decision-driven movement that actually shows up in competition. Here's what happens when researchers test the ladder itself against that standard.
Research · Recovery
Do Deload Weeks Actually Work? What the Research Says About Planned Recovery
Deload weeks are near-universal in strength programming, usually justified with one word: supercompensation. The direct research on deloading itself is recent, thin, and more modest than the marketing around it — here's what it, and its much better-studied cousin tapering, actually show.
Research · Training Load Monitoring
How Hard Was That, Really? What the Research Says About RPE as a Training Load Tool
Heart-rate straps and GPS vests promise objective proof of how hard a session really was. A far simpler, free alternative — asking the athlete — has been tested against them for over two decades, across sports, resistance training, and youth athletes, and it holds up. What the validation research actually shows, and how to run it properly.
Research · Youth Development
Does Jump Training Stunt Growth? What the Evidence on Youth Plyometrics Actually Shows
Depth jumps and box jumps get blamed for damaged growth plates and stunted height more than almost anything else in a youth training program. The peer-reviewed evidence on safety, starting age, and dosage says something far more specific — and considerably less alarming.
Research · Spine Biomechanics
The Six-Pack Myth: What Spine Biomechanics Research Says About Core Training
Crunches build a six-pack, core training means ab training, targeted work burns belly fat — three beliefs that drive most gym ab routines. Spine biomechanics research, led by Stuart McGill's four-decade body of work, contradicts all three.
Research · Long-Term Athletic Development
Pre-PHV, Circa-PHV, Post-PHV: What to Actually Train at Each Stage
The LTAD literature is usually cited for one thing: don't specialize early. Less discussed is what it actually recommends training at each stage of a young athlete's development — organized not by birthday, but by peak height velocity.
Research · Concussion Recovery
School Before Sport: What the Evidence Says About Concussion Recovery in Young Athletes
For years, the standard advice after a youth concussion was near-total rest — a dark room, no screens, no school — until every symptom disappeared. A randomized trial and two international consensus statements say that approach doesn't just fail to help recovery. It makes it slower, and it gets the sequence of getting a young athlete back to normal life backwards.
Research · Football Conditioning
The Small-Sided Games Dial: How Pitch Size, Player Numbers, and Rules Control Football Conditioning
Small-sided games get sold as a technical drill — more touches, faster decisions. The sports-science literature treats them as something else: a conditioning stimulus with its own adjustable dials. What controlled research on pitch size, player numbers, and rules actually shows about turning heart rate, running volume, and intensity up or down without changing the sport being played.
Research · Testing & Assessment
Functional Movement Screening: What It Actually Predicts About Injury (and What It Doesn't)
A Functional Movement Screen score of 14 or below gets treated in gyms and locker rooms as a red flag for injury. The study that number comes from tested 46 players on one NFL team. What happened when the same question got asked at nearly twenty times the sample size — and in the field's own meta-analyses — is a considerably messier, more honest story.
Research · Youth Development
How Strong Should a Teenager Be? The Research Says That's the Wrong Question
A parent's question always sounds simple: is this a good squat for his age? The evidence-based answer rejects the premise — a teenager's strength should be measured against their own training age, not against a table built from adult or elite standards.
Personal · Parents & Youth Sport
The Letters After Their Name Aren't the Whole Answer: How to Actually Vet a Youth Strength Coach
Every certification looks the same laminated behind glass at the front desk. The letters after a name tell you someone passed an exam — not whether they know how to individualise a session for a growing kid, or read a growth spurt mid-season. Here's what I'd actually ask, grounded in what the credentialing bodies require and what NSCA's own guidance says a "qualified professional" is supposed to look like.
Research · Training Science
"Functional Training" Is a Marketing Term — Here's What the Research Actually Says Works
BOSU balls, wobble boards, and unstable-surface "functional training" are sold on the promise of superior real-world transfer. The actual research shows the opposite for trained athletes: instability reliably reduces force and power output. Here's what the evidence says works instead — and where instability training genuinely earns its place.
Research · Power Development
Post-Activation Potentiation, Explained: What Actually Happens When a Heavy Lift 'Wakes Up' Explosive Power
A heavy back squat minutes before a long jump attempt looks like superstition. It's actually a real, decades-studied phenomenon called post-activation potentiation — but the peer-reviewed evidence is far more conditional than the gym-floor version of the story, and a meaningful share of athletes barely respond to it at all.
Research · Athlete Development
Most Olympic Medallists Didn't Specialize Early — What the Data on 9,241 Elite Athletes Shows
The largest pooled dataset ever assembled on how elite athletes actually grew up — 9,241 athletes, 262 samples — finds world-class seniors more often sampled multiple sports and specialized later than the athletes who never reached that level, not the reverse.
Research · Football Conditioning
Aerobic Base or HIIT? What Controlled Research Says About Conditioning Footballers
For decades the default way to build a footballer's engine was distance: long, steady runs at a comfortable pace, logged in kilometres. Controlled research directly testing that model against short, near-maximal intervals found something specific enough to change how a season should actually be planned.
Research · Warm-Up Design
The RAMP Protocol: What the Research Actually Says About Structuring a Warm-Up
Most warm-ups are an afterthought — a jog, a few stretches, whatever's left before the clock starts. The RAMP protocol (Raise, Activate, Mobilize, Potentiate) treats warming up as a designed sequence instead, and a growing set of controlled trials now shows why the order, dose, and timing of each phase actually change what happens next.
Research · Strength & Power
Single-Leg or Double-Leg? What the Comparative Research Actually Shows About Transfer to Sport
One camp argues sport is played on one leg, so training should be too. The other defends the bilateral squat as the base everything else is built on. Eight studies that tested the two head-to-head — plus the "bilateral deficit" driving the argument — give a more precise answer than either side expects.
Research · Sport Psychology
What Sport Psychology Research Actually Says About Mental Toughness in Young Athletes
"Resilience" and "mental toughness" are two of the most heavily marketed words in youth sport. The underlying psychology is real — growth mindset, coping-skills training, and sport-specific resilience models all have genuine evidence behind them — but it's narrower and more qualified than the pitch, and at least one widely sold mental-toughness test has a validity problem its own sellers haven't resolved.
Research · Combat Sports Injury Prevention
Shoulders, Hips, and Ankles: What the Evidence Says About Warming Up for Combat Sports
Most combat-sports warm-ups are a jog and a stretch, built for nothing in particular. The injury data says something more specific — and while dedicated trials inside a fight gym are still scarce, two real combat-sport RCTs and a much deeper team-sport evidence base point toward a warm-up built around the exact joints striking and grappling actually put at risk.
Research · Schools & PE
PE Class Is Supposed to Be 50% Movement. Research Says It Usually Isn't
Health authorities set a specific, measurable bar for physical education: at least half of class time should be spent in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. Decades of measurement studies — using stopwatches, trained observers, and accelerometers — put the real figure closer to 40%, and lower still in high school. Here's what the evidence actually shows, including the one Singapore-specific study available.
Research · Combat Sports Safety
Weight Cutting in Combat Sports: What the Research Says About the Risks — and What Actually Works
Dehydration-based weight cutting is one of combat sport's oldest rituals, and one of its most dangerous. A look at what peer-reviewed sports medicine says about the risks to adolescent athletes, and the body-composition strategies that hold up under scrutiny.
Research · ACL Rehabilitation
Return-to-Play Testing After ACL Reconstruction: What Hop Tests and Limb Symmetry Actually Predict
Hop tests, limb symmetry index cutoffs, and isokinetic strength ratios are the standard battery used to clear athletes after ACL reconstruction. A closer look at the evidence shows passing them is a weaker guarantee against re-injury than the 90% number suggests.
Research · Tendon Physiology
Why Tendons Adapt Slower Than Muscle — And What That Means for Young Athletes
Muscle strength can climb sharply within weeks of a training block; tendon stiffness catches up one to two months later, if at all. A look at the physiology behind that lag, the isometric and heavy-slow-resistance protocols shown to close it, and why the gap matters most for young athletes still growing into jumping and sprinting demands.
Research · Periodization
Periodization for Combat Sports: Structuring a Fight Camp From General Prep to Fight Night
Most fight camps are run as one long block of hard rounds that gets slightly harder every week. Peer-reviewed strength and conditioning research describes something different — a sequence of physiologically distinct phases, each with its own rules for volume, intensity, and specificity, and a taper that is planned in advance rather than improvised in fight week.
Research · Youth Athletic Development
Is Marathon Training Safe for Kids? What the Research on Youth Distance Running Shows
Pediatric sports medicine bodies broadly support youth distance running up to about 5K, but they draw a clear, evidence-based line well short of marathon training for children and early adolescents. Here is what the AAP, IMMDA, and recent research actually recommend.
Research · Player Safety
Heading the Ball: What the Research Actually Says About Concussion Risk in Youth Football
Former professional footballers die of neurodegenerative disease at nearly three-and-a-half times the expected rate. Here is what the science linking heading to long-term brain health actually shows — and how the FA, US Soccer, and other associations have rewritten youth football's rules in response.
Research · Youth Athletic Development
Barefoot Training for Young Athletes: What the Research Actually Shows
Barefoot and minimalist footwear have real, controlled-trial support for building foot strength in children — but the same age group also shows impact loading rates that more than double the moment cushioning comes off, right at the age when the heel's growth plate is most vulnerable.
Research · Coaching Collaboration
Same Gym, Different Mandate: What Research Says About PE Teacher–Coach Collaboration
A review of physical education and sport pedagogy literature on what separates specialist-coach partnerships that build a school's own capacity from ones that quietly replace it — and the role-clarity frameworks that make the difference.
Research · Racquet Sports & Swimming
Same Motion, Every Rep: What the Evidence Says About Overuse Injury in Youth Tennis, Badminton, and Swimming
Tennis, badminton, and competitive swimming carry no contact and, in swimming's case, no impact at all — and youth injury rates in the literature still run 47–60% per season. Real peer-reviewed data on tennis elbow and shoulder, badminton's early-starting shoulder pain, and swimmer's shoulder, including where the prevention evidence holds up and where it genuinely doesn't.
Research · Youth Athlete Nutrition
Nutrition Timing for Young Athletes: What the Evidence Actually Supports
What pediatric and adolescent sports nutrition position statements say about spreading protein across the day, timing carbohydrate around training, and getting hydration basics right for young athletes — without restrictive dieting messaging that has no place in a growing child's diet.
Research · Mental Performance
Before the Shot: What the Research Says About Pre-Competition Routines in Young Athletes
A structured sequence before a free throw or serve is not superstition — it is a measurable performance tool. Here is what sport psychology research actually shows about pre-performance routines in young athletes, and where the evidence runs thin.
Research · Recovery
Sleep, HRV, or a Simple Questionnaire? What Actually Predicts Overtraining
Wearables promise a single number that tells you when you're overtraining. The joint consensus statement from sport science's two largest professional bodies says no marker — hormonal, HRV, or otherwise — has earned that claim. What the evidence actually supports instead.
Research · Programming
Linear, Undulating, or Block Periodization? What the Comparative Research Actually Shows
Ask three coaches which periodization model is best and you'll get three confident, contradictory answers. A 29-study meta-analysis found linear and undulating periodization produce statistically identical strength gains — the real differences show up somewhere else entirely.
Research · Injury & Recovery
Pain-Free Is Not the Same as Ready: What Actually Predicts a Safe Return to Sport
The question after any real injury isn't "does it hurt anymore" — it's whether the athlete can actually take the forces sport demands without it happening again. The two turn out to be measuring almost entirely different things.
Research · Corporate Wellness
Does Corporate Wellness Actually Pay Off? What the Largest Trial Ever Run Found
The most rigorous study of a workplace wellness program ever run found real changes in self-reported health habits — and no measurable effect on absenteeism, healthcare spending, or employee retention, even three years in. A broader look across 47 trials adds a more complicated, more useful picture.
Research · Youth Development
Will Lifting Stunt My Kid's Growth? What the Research Actually Says
It's the objection I hear before almost any other, from almost every parent, before a young athlete touches a barbell for the first time. The safety data says the opposite of what most people assume.
Local Scene · 2026
What's Actually Happening in Singapore's Strength & Conditioning Scene Right Now
Singapore's S&C world is small, but it's genuinely active this year — an international accreditation course running here, a national chapter backing a summit, a sport science conference. A roundup of what's real, and what it means for choosing a coach.
Research · Youth Development
The 10,000-Hour Rule Is Wrong — What the Research Actually Says About Young Athletes
Two of the most common beliefs about developing young athletes — specialize early, log your 10,000 hours — are directly contradicted by the NSCA's own position statement on long-term athletic development. Here's what it actually recommends instead.
Research · Schools & PE
What a Good School PE Program Actually Tracks (It's Not Just the Fitness Test)
Ask most parents what their child's PE program measures and the honest answer is "the NAPFA score." Both SHAPE America's national standards and Singapore's own assessment framework say that's one of four things a real program should be tracking — not a stand-in for the other three.